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It's based on supply and demand. In 2012, when I was shopping for an engagement ring, a natural 2ct diamond cost $250,000. (I bought a 2ct moissanite for much,

It's based on supply and demand. In 2012, when I was shopping for an engagement ring, a natural 2ct diamond cost $250,000. (I bought a 2ct moissanite for much, much less, and my wife is very happy with it.) When I looked in fall 2023, a natural 2ct diamond cost $20,000. That's a loss of over 90% of value, not counting inflation! (Now the supply of diamonds is much higher, and the demand for natural diamonds is much lower.) I suspect that natural diamonds will be sold for a 40-300% premium over manufactured. I also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab. > Artificial diamonds BTW, there is no such thing as an artificial diamond. A manufactured diamond is 100% diamond, for all intents and purposes.

tikhonj 2y ago
> I also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab. I hope that happens for purely aesthetic reasons too: natural "imperfections" add a lot of visual variety and interest that's otherwise missing in a lot of diamond jewellery—at least the sort that I've seen.
- meling 2y ago
  Pretty sure you can add random/natural imperfections in the lab too!
kaashif 2y ago
> BTW, there is no such thing as an artificial diamond. A manufactured diamond is 100% diamond What do you believe the distinction between artificial and manufactured is? As far as I'm aware, they're almost synonyms. Dictionaries literally list "man made" as one of the definitions of artificial.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  A man-made television isn't an artificial television; a man-made taco isn't an artificial taco. Man-made beef and artificial beef are both the same thing: a not-beef beef substitute. Beef is by definition cow-made. Man-made diamonds are just diamonds.
  - Nevermark 2y ago
    Last I heard from the forefront of geology and ecology, "natural" televisions and tacos have yet to be found. So I don't think the distinction is best analyzed with examples like that. If something is normally created and nature, and humans find a way to reproduce it, it is common to call the human produced versions artificial even if the result is identical in principle. Humans make lots of distinctions that fall apart if we get too pedantic, but have useful casual, cultural, or practical associations and meanings.
    - LanceH 2y ago
      Burn hydrogen to make water. Is that artificial water? Or is it forever artificial water? Is all water that mixes with it artificial water? Is all water now artificial since it has mixed with human made water? While the basic definition seems to be merely "man-made", I would say it holds there is some underlying distinction between the natural and artificial. Natural light vs artificial light -- the two are distinctly different. But are the photons produced by a light bulb artificial, or are they natural photons? Artificial diamonds are more diamond than diamonds. The diamond portions are identical, regardless of origin. Or maybe there are trapped gasses or other identifiers left in them that make them distinct. I don't really know about this point. Anyhow, the natural vs artificial distinction really seems to break down when things are (literally) physically and chemically identical.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        >Burn hydrogen to make water. Is that artificial water? Or is it forever artificial water? This depends on whether you ask a scientist or a homeopathic practitioner.
      - kortex 2y ago
        That's not what makes things artificial vs natural. Artificial vanillin is "more vanilla than real vanilla". A natural vanillin molecule is indistinguishable from fully synthetic vanillin from crude oil. The latter is still called "artificial flavor".
- SamBam 2y ago
  Indeed, "artificial diamond" is one of the top examples of the first definition of "artificial" at Merriam-Webster, which is "man-made." [1] Etymologically it means "made by skill." But I understand the hesitation to use the word, as it gives an impression of "fake." https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial
acchow 2y ago
> also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab. Why can’t you add impurities when manufacturing a diamond? “Doping”
- db48x 2y ago
  You can, but a flaw in a gem is usually an inclusion of some other mineral, a crack, or a hollow space.
  - grues-dinner 2y ago
    This is Gary: his job is to give the machine a solid kick once a day and crack the vacuum seal on Fridays. Gary made us 120 million in imperfections last quarter.
- JonChesterfield 2y ago
  You get them whether you want it or not, at least some of the time. Entropy and so forth. The synthetic ones with worse imperfections are cheaper. It's probably possible to guess by inspection whether the imperfection properties imply mined vs lab grown, with some level of accuracy. Source for the existence of imperfections is reading through lists of specific diamonds a few years ago. The synthetic ones didn't vary much in colour but did vary in number and distribution of inclusions.
asdff 2y ago
The realities of this market have not hit the consumers. Even young people are still out there spending 5-6 figures on a rock and ascribing real value and aspirations towards eventually "upgrading" into said rocks from perhaps an existing synthetic alternative already set in the ring. Even if the supply side price argument is so perverted now, we still have a culture that wants to put a high value on this object for sentimental reasons. No one wants to hear that diamond rings are worthless. They want to spend money on it. Spending an appreciable amount of your savings on it is the entire significance of it, not really the value prospect.
- pyrolistical 2y ago
  A good example of how marketing can produce cultural values
- gwbas1c 2y ago
  > No one wants to hear that diamond rings are worthless. You might convince them that their diamonds are worthless, and that a better investment is cryptocurrency!
  - koolba 2y ago
    Someone should market a synthetic diamond that has a crypto address etched onto it. It just had to be big enough that the augmented reality glasses can automatically pick it up to render the account balance.
- slt2021 2y ago
  >> They want to spend money on it. no guy ever wants to shell out $$$ for a useless rock
  - Smaug123 2y ago
    It's not useless as such, although certainly its use is exceedingly niche. My headcanon is that Cecil Rhodes saw something back in the 1880s, something which drove him to create a corporate engine which would continue to bend the culture centuries after his own death. Now, a hundred and fifty years later, an appreciable fraction of the population carries with them at all times an object capable of scratching everything. What he saw, I cannot say, but one day in our hour of need the population will be equipped.
dboreham 2y ago
Quick note that a very nice 2ct stone has never cost $200,000. Not sure who was trying to charge you that much in 2012 or why, but gem diamond prices haven't changed much in the past 30 years, although there was an uptick in the covid/inflationary years, and a reversion to trend more recently. https://www.pricescope.com/diamond-prices/diamond-prices-chart/ https://www.pricescope.com/diamond-prices/diamond-prices-cha...
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  Jewelry store wanted to anchor the price?
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  Even today, Tiffany will want to charge you $142,000 for a 2ct IF (internally flawless) colorless (D) diamond. Not quite $200K but nonetheless.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    This is like arguing about somebody saying a car costs $25,000 when you’re talking about a Bentley. It’s expensive because it’s a Bentley not because it’s a car.
    - IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
      I take your point but theres a still a huge gap to make up for. I went deep on this topic a couple of years before OP' 2012 date. An IF 2ct would not have exceeded ~80k usd. Not from Tiffany but from a national US shop. And the retailer shouldnt have mattered anyway. 80 is orders of magnitude lower than 250k.
      - paulcole 2y ago
        > 80 is orders of magnitude lower than 250k. Well 80k is one order of magnitude smaller than 250k. Remind me again, how many orders of magnitude difference are there between say a Bentley Continental ($242k) and a Tesla Model S ($76k)? Luxury products cost a lot.

tikhonj 2y ago

> I also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab. I hope that happens for purely aesthetic reasons too: natural "imperfections" add a lot of visual variety and interest that's otherwise missing in a lot of diamond jewellery—at least the sort that I've seen.

meling 2y ago
Pretty sure you can add random/natural imperfections in the lab too!

kaashif 2y ago

> BTW, there is no such thing as an artificial diamond. A manufactured diamond is 100% diamond What do you believe the distinction between artificial and manufactured is? As far as I'm aware, they're almost synonyms. Dictionaries literally list "man made" as one of the definitions of artificial.

pessimizer 2y ago
A man-made television isn't an artificial television; a man-made taco isn't an artificial taco. Man-made beef and artificial beef are both the same thing: a not-beef beef substitute. Beef is by definition cow-made. Man-made diamonds are just diamonds.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  Last I heard from the forefront of geology and ecology, "natural" televisions and tacos have yet to be found. So I don't think the distinction is best analyzed with examples like that. If something is normally created and nature, and humans find a way to reproduce it, it is common to call the human produced versions artificial even if the result is identical in principle. Humans make lots of distinctions that fall apart if we get too pedantic, but have useful casual, cultural, or practical associations and meanings.
  - LanceH 2y ago
    Burn hydrogen to make water. Is that artificial water? Or is it forever artificial water? Is all water that mixes with it artificial water? Is all water now artificial since it has mixed with human made water? While the basic definition seems to be merely "man-made", I would say it holds there is some underlying distinction between the natural and artificial. Natural light vs artificial light -- the two are distinctly different. But are the photons produced by a light bulb artificial, or are they natural photons? Artificial diamonds are more diamond than diamonds. The diamond portions are identical, regardless of origin. Or maybe there are trapped gasses or other identifiers left in them that make them distinct. I don't really know about this point. Anyhow, the natural vs artificial distinction really seems to break down when things are (literally) physically and chemically identical.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      >Burn hydrogen to make water. Is that artificial water? Or is it forever artificial water? This depends on whether you ask a scientist or a homeopathic practitioner.
    - kortex 2y ago
      That's not what makes things artificial vs natural. Artificial vanillin is "more vanilla than real vanilla". A natural vanillin molecule is indistinguishable from fully synthetic vanillin from crude oil. The latter is still called "artificial flavor".
SamBam 2y ago
Indeed, "artificial diamond" is one of the top examples of the first definition of "artificial" at Merriam-Webster, which is "man-made." [1] Etymologically it means "made by skill." But I understand the hesitation to use the word, as it gives an impression of "fake." https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial

acchow 2y ago

> also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab. Why can’t you add impurities when manufacturing a diamond? “Doping”

db48x 2y ago
You can, but a flaw in a gem is usually an inclusion of some other mineral, a crack, or a hollow space.
- grues-dinner 2y ago
  This is Gary: his job is to give the machine a solid kick once a day and crack the vacuum seal on Fridays. Gary made us 120 million in imperfections last quarter.
JonChesterfield 2y ago
You get them whether you want it or not, at least some of the time. Entropy and so forth. The synthetic ones with worse imperfections are cheaper. It's probably possible to guess by inspection whether the imperfection properties imply mined vs lab grown, with some level of accuracy. Source for the existence of imperfections is reading through lists of specific diamonds a few years ago. The synthetic ones didn't vary much in colour but did vary in number and distribution of inclusions.

asdff 2y ago

The realities of this market have not hit the consumers. Even young people are still out there spending 5-6 figures on a rock and ascribing real value and aspirations towards eventually "upgrading" into said rocks from perhaps an existing synthetic alternative already set in the ring. Even if the supply side price argument is so perverted now, we still have a culture that wants to put a high value on this object for sentimental reasons. No one wants to hear that diamond rings are worthless. They want to spend money on it. Spending an appreciable amount of your savings on it is the entire significance of it, not really the value prospect.

pyrolistical 2y ago
A good example of how marketing can produce cultural values
gwbas1c 2y ago
> No one wants to hear that diamond rings are worthless. You might convince them that their diamonds are worthless, and that a better investment is cryptocurrency!
- koolba 2y ago
  Someone should market a synthetic diamond that has a crypto address etched onto it. It just had to be big enough that the augmented reality glasses can automatically pick it up to render the account balance.
slt2021 2y ago
>> They want to spend money on it. no guy ever wants to shell out $$$ for a useless rock
- Smaug123 2y ago
  It's not useless as such, although certainly its use is exceedingly niche. My headcanon is that Cecil Rhodes saw something back in the 1880s, something which drove him to create a corporate engine which would continue to bend the culture centuries after his own death. Now, a hundred and fifty years later, an appreciable fraction of the population carries with them at all times an object capable of scratching everything. What he saw, I cannot say, but one day in our hour of need the population will be equipped.

dboreham 2y ago

Quick note that a very nice 2ct stone has never cost $200,000. Not sure who was trying to charge you that much in 2012 or why, but gem diamond prices haven't changed much in the past 30 years, although there was an uptick in the covid/inflationary years, and a reversion to trend more recently. https://www.pricescope.com/diamond-prices/diamond-prices-chart/ https://www.pricescope.com/diamond-prices/diamond-prices-cha...

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
Jewelry store wanted to anchor the price?
FireBeyond 2y ago
Even today, Tiffany will want to charge you $142,000 for a 2ct IF (internally flawless) colorless (D) diamond. Not quite $200K but nonetheless.
- paulcole 2y ago
  This is like arguing about somebody saying a car costs $25,000 when you’re talking about a Bentley. It’s expensive because it’s a Bentley not because it’s a car.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
    I take your point but theres a still a huge gap to make up for. I went deep on this topic a couple of years before OP' 2012 date. An IF 2ct would not have exceeded ~80k usd. Not from Tiffany but from a national US shop. And the retailer shouldnt have mattered anyway. 80 is orders of magnitude lower than 250k.
    - paulcole 2y ago
      > 80 is orders of magnitude lower than 250k. Well 80k is one order of magnitude smaller than 250k. Remind me again, how many orders of magnitude difference are there between say a Bentley Continental ($242k) and a Tesla Model S ($76k)? Luxury products cost a lot.